Patrick Doyle’s Excellent North-to-Alaska Road Trip

Left to right are: James Portoraro from Toronto, Patrick Doyle of Halifax , Mariah Gouchie from Edmonton and Krisztina Mosdossy from London, Ontario with their well worn 1999 Chevy Cavalier coupe on the Alaska.

Some of my first dreams of travel were spawned by my grandfather on Mum’s side who would show twin Larry and I countries on his big desk globe he was so proud of.

Grampy Gallant told us that a figure 8 (an analemma), about the size of a domino in the South Pacific Ocean, marked an area that belonged to him.

Of course we believed him and, on the annual road trip of 1,000 kilometres from Moncton to Montreal, I would savour the road trip but could hardly wait for Gramps to spin his globe and more yarns of places he never ever traveled to.

Hearing these stories in Montreal where the potato chips and chocolate bars had strange wrappers, where French was spoken and people of all races roamed the streets, was the catalyst of my thirst for road trip.

Those family voyages eventually gave way to a driver’s licence and a long line of beaters, those $90 cars that begged for one last shot at the road. Road weary heaps that were in essence expendable.

Major breakdown in Moosemin, Saskatchewan? No problem. Sell the rig to a local service station for fifteen bucks, stick your thumb out and hitchhike the rest of the way.

Of late, I’ve been concerned about the health of the go-for-broke road trip though. Does the generation that grew up strapped into car seats in a Ford Windstar glued to Toy Story and Shrek have a burning desire for the endless road?

I was cheered up last week when friend and business associate, Michael Doyle, told me his son Patrick was on a road trip from Calgary to Alaska in a 1999 Chevy Cavalier he got from a friend, free.

The black two-door coupe has seen better days. At first, Patrick thought the digital speedometer did not work but at night a faint glow reveals the speed and an odometer that reads just over 245,000 kilometres.

Hmmmmm. A free 16-year-old car. The open road. No specific destination. Fistful of dollars. Time to spare. Road Trip indeed!

I managed to contact Patrick Doyle in Whitehorse, the Yukon, to see how things were going for him and his three travel companions, all tree planters who worked together in British Columbia and Alberta. Two girls and a guy.

Mariah Gouchie from Edmonton, Krisztina Mosdossy from London, Ontario and James Portoraro from the Toronto area.

Is it the trip or the destination I asked Patrick?

“Getting there is the best. That’s the great thing of a road trip, it’s always getting there. Plus, we actually don’t have any final destination in mind, so we’re always just getting somewhere.”

How is the free car treating you and your road trippers?

“I think the best thing about the car is that it's developed its own personality, or ‘ticks’ may be a more appropriate word to use,” Patrick wrote. “I think the computer's gone a little haywire so all the warning lights on the dash constantly light up. We've also painted some stencils and applied decals of our travels onto the beast, which adds to its personality.”

The idea of the trip had been floating in all their heads, most likely when planting 1,000 trees a day on the side of a slope in the pouring rain. Enchanted with far-off remote ‘frontiers,’ Alaska of course qualified.

“Pinpointing the funniest thing that's happened so far is not the easiest thing to do. Tree planters' humour is a strange beast that isn't easily translatable for immediate comprehension. There's plenty of laughter all around though, that's for sure,” mused Patrick. “The scariest thing we came across was probably $1.75/litre regular gas somewhere along kilometre 600 on the Alaska Highway.”

Not surprisingly, they’ve met many people on the road so far. On the second day of the trip, they were having trouble finding a place to set up camp and decided to knock on someone’s door in Pouce Coupe, BC, just outside of Dawson Creek, to camp in their yard.

Despite it being late, with four smelly young adult strangers appearing at their front door, an elderly couple, Helen and Don, were more than accommodating. They ended up making them breakfast the following morning and regaled them with stories for hours.

At first they thought they were just going to abandon the Cavalier, the free car that’s been pushed to its limit in America’s Last Frontier. But it’s been running so well they may hold onto it a bit longer yet. Pass the favour forward to someone else perhaps?

My last question to Patrick Doyle was about the mood aboard the car as they penetrated The North.

“We’ve actually been pretty fight-free. Being tree planters, we’ve been living with each other in close quarters for the past three months. So far, four of us stuffed in a tiny black coupe with all our gear hasn’t made us hate each other yet,” Patrick Doyle wrote.